Then what sounded like screaming – fairly incessant shouts which seemed like they were coming from my right, near Westminster tube station.

From where I sit in the Westminster lobby, the window directly on my right-hand side looks directly out onto New Palace Yard – the pleasant green in front of Big Ben. Those who have visited Parliament will know it well.

I went to the window, almost expecting it to be a construction worker injured – there’s always repair work going on in Westminster.

But upon seeing the street scene below it was clear something far worse had happened. People were running in floods, almost like a stampede, from Westminster Bridge and away from Parliament Square.

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The next thing I saw was one of the policeman who guard the car gate into New Palace Yard being confronted by a man.

At first, I wasn’t sure if the man was scared and looking for refuge – but then it turned violent.

The policeman was shoved back and then pushed to the floor, right in front of a metal crash barrier before the green, and started lunging at the policeman on the floor.

It was unclear to me what was being carried in the man’s hands but he made swinging, stab-like motions at the policeman while he lay on the floor. Reports, tragically, now confirm the policeman was being stabbed to death in front of my very eyes.

There were then shouts as police ran from the Parliament premises to help their colleague.

Photo taken with permission from the Twitter feed of James West (@westicles69) of a crashed car on Bridge Street by the Palace of Westminster after the terror attack (Image: James West/PA Wire)

As I reached for my mobile phone to start live tweeting what I was seeing, I saw a policeman dressed all in black, to the left of the attacked officer, approaching the assailant slowly. The armed officer was not far from the visitor’s café.

There seemed to be some kind of verbal shouts between the black-attired officer and the man before the armed officer fired off two to three shots, causing the attacker to crumple to the floor.

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Within just a few minutes, police cars with their blue sirens came blaring into Parliament Square and it was evacuated. The earlier stampede had helped clear most people anyhow.

Paramedics began to see to the officer on the floor and colleagues in my lobby room say they saw CPR being performed.

A bright red helicopter soon landed on the grass in Parliament Square and paramedics worked in the yard below for about 20 minutes or so before a patient – I believe the police officer – was taken by air to hospital where, we found out later, he would die.

Patrick Daly

What happened next didn’t quite feel like it was happening to me. Maybe it happens in films about journalists at the Washington Post, but it doesn’t happen to a regional journalist who, only minutes before, had been filing stories about Parliament’s costly restoration and Brexit’s impact on Bristol.

A stout female police officer came into our room to tell us to stay away from the windows, in case of further shooting, and messages flashed on Parliament’s television screens telling us the building was in “lock down”.

A video I had taken of the immediate aftermath – just a 16 second clip which showed staff running to the aid of the attacked policeman – went viral on social media, leading to tens of news agencies contacting me for interviews.

All around me, the journalists I share a room with were doing the same and recalling what they had seen to their own or other media outlets.

As journalists, our reports are usually about House of Commons debates and political wrangles. On this occasion, we were old-fashioned news reporters once again – reporting from the scene as eyewitnesses to a terrible and terrifying terrorist attack on the streets of Britain.

Emergency personnel on Westminster Bridge, close to the Palace of Westminster (Image: Lauren Hurley/PA Wire)

What we weren’t to know was the rest of the story. I had seen a stabbing and a shooting, and focused on telling readers that story. It was only after a frantic phone conversation with my news editor that I could start to piece together what I had seen and that the bang I had heard first of all had been the car ploughing into innocent people on Westminster Bridge. It was their screams that I’d heard.

The news channels then did the rest, drip-feeding us the full picture of the horror which had taken place just next to Parliament, the place us lobby correspondents are able to call “the office”.

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Terror attack in London

Texts and WhatsApp messages came through from family, friends and other loved ones asking if I was okay. Yes, I’m fine, I told them all. It was hard to put into words to them that I had been in the relative safety of a third floor office. It was others who had paid a horrendous price for merely doing their job or choosing to holiday in London.

About two hours after the awful events, a smartly dressed detective entered our room on the lobby corridor, affectionately known as the ‘Burma Road’. He flashed his badge at us and kindly asked us to evacuate. We trudged slowly down the long flight of stairs to Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the parliamentary estate.

The look we gave each other was of silent acknowledgement. We were involved in history. Only, not the kind of history we ever wanted to report on, let alone be witnesses to.

Terror had reared its ugly, nonsensical head again not only on our shores – but at the core of our very democracy.